Industrial Uniterruptible Power Supply Batteries Monitoring Augmentation by Infrared Camera

Uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) are vital for different industries. Along with a rise in their complexity, the requirements for a UPS become more important. UPSs are meant to protect technologies from damage caused by various interruptions of an electric power supply. Advanced monitoring of UPS ensured by a battery management system (BMS) is able to prevent from more serious damage thanks to a mechanism of in-time and accurate battery-fault detection, which is based on voltage metering. This mechanism is widely used, but its use gets very expensive. This also poses an obstacle in the further applications of the battery systems. This paper gives an overview of Czech national standards aimed at batteries used in industrial UPSs. As the temperature is the second key indicator of a battery's health, the battery voltage being the first, our research aims to develop a low-cost UPS monitoring system using infrared thermographic measurements. The research builds on an assumption that overheating of a battery implies a state of damage. The paper describes the design of an extended automatized metering platform.